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At the White House, Losing a Game of Phone Tag

The White House switchboard — able to conjure up Santa Claus at a moment’s notice for a young Caroline Kennedy — is famous for its ability to track down anyone, anywhere, anytime.

But last week, both the White House and the secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, were unable to muster that switchboard magic to reach Shirley Sherrod, the Department of Agriculture official who was forced to resign based on an edited video clip that made it look as if she had discriminated against a white farmer.

“The White House operator tried on at least two occasions last night and was both unable to reach her and unable to leave a voice mail,” the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said in a briefing Thursday.

Some presidential historians said they were shocked at how long it took a White House that prides itself on being tech savvy — President Obama, after all, fought to keep his BlackBerry — to get through.

“I was astonished,” said Richard Reeves, a professor at the University of Southern California and the author of several books about the presidency. “It seems impossible to me that the president can’t get to people anytime he wants to.”

Other historians and political strategists said they found it hard to believe that though the Agriculture Department managed to call Ms. Sherrod (three times, she says) on Monday to ask her to tender her resignation via BlackBerry, the White House could not reach her until Thursday.

At that point it finally got through with a text message saying that the president had been trying to reach her since Wednesday night. She called him back at the White House.

Critics suggest that the administration may have been shading the truth to buy more time, as it raced to belatedly gather more information about Ms. Sherrod and figure out how to handle the situation.

In a tough week for Mr. Obama, the matter turned into yet another bad snapshot — a picture of a president who some criticize as disconnected finding himself unable to connect, literally. One blogger deemed it “an image of impotence.”

The term “switchboard” seems almost quaint in the 21st century, a bit like phone booths and more evocative of a “Mad Men” era. Nevertheless, Americans have an image of a White House switchboard as a last line of defense, one that could get the Russian president on the line in an instant to ward off a “Dr. Strangelove” style incident, never mind a federal employee.

Even though Ms. Sherrod was out of touch for a few hours, traveling on a plane to New York from Atlanta, and her voice mailbox not accepting new messages, running her down would have been a laughable challenge to the switchboard of yore.

“Let’s say she was on the plane,” Mr. Reeves said. “If they wanted to get a message to the pilot of that plane, they would have no trouble.”

Much of the time, Ms. Sherrod was busy chatting her way through network and cable television, leaving the White House and Mr. Vilsack scrambling to get her. When, at a news briefing, a reporter remarked, “She’s been all over TV — why wasn’t she reachable,” the press secretary wryly replied, “It may have been because she was all over TV.”

Photo

The White House switchboard, on the second floor of the West Wing, in 1955, when its operators’ reliability was unquestioned.Credit
Associated Press

Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University, had his own take: “It may be a metaphor for a kind of societal incompetence, where a 20-year-old intern for CNN or Fox or MSNBC can track down the main players, when the federal government can’t.”

An especially surreal moment occurred at a briefing Wednesday, when Ms. Sherrod watched, via a split screen on CNN, as Mr. Gibbs chronicled Mr. Vilsack’s struggles to get in touch with her.

“Apparently, she’s watching this briefing, Shirley Sherrod, on CNN right now,” said Jake Tapper of ABC, to the amusement of the press corps. “Is there anything you want to say to her?” (“The secretary is trying to reach her,” Mr. Gibbs offered, again.)

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The Sherrod episode aside, the power of the White House operators is famous, back to the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose chief telephone operator, Louise Hackmeister, called the switchboard “my baby.”

“People would butter her up and bring her cakes, because they wanted to be put through to the president, and she had that much power,” said the historian Michael Beschloss.

The White House installed a 10-position Western Electric switchboard with old-fashioned black and red wires in 1963 to keep up with the heavy call volume after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. When President Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he ordered a $27 million overhaul that included voice mail and direct dialing, grumbling that he arrived to find the “same phone system Jimmy Carter had.”

Now, the White House has 14 operators, and fields about 4,000 calls a day during the week, and about 2,500 a day on the weekend. The operators serve as part secretary, part diplomat, part gatekeeper (screening prank calls, among other things), and part detective. And, of course, they can usually get just about anyone on the line.

“I could pick up the phone and say, ‘God, I don’t remember this guy’s name, but he was here at the White House, he’s in Hollywood and he works on such and such and he came to see the president one time,’ and they’d come back with him on the phone for you,” said Gerald Rafshoon, President Jimmy Carter’s communications director. “They could find anybody, and they were so great to work with.”

Mr. Kennedy seemed particularly fond of the operators, and often showed off their skills as a parlor trick. Once, he ordered them to track down a staff member who, unknown to them, was standing next to him in the Oval Office. They found him minutes later.

Another time, Mr. Kennedy challenged Benjamin C. Bradlee, the former Washington Post executive editor who was then at Newsweek, and the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, to come up with a person whom the operators could not find. Mrs. Kennedy suggested Truman Capote, whose number was unlisted.

“Kennedy picked up the telephone and said only: ‘Yes, this is the president. Would you please get me Truman Capote?’ — no other identification,” Mr. Bradlee wrote in his book “Conversations with Kennedy.” “Thirty minutes later, Capote was on the line, not from his own unlisted number in Brooklyn Heights, but at the home of a friend in Palm Springs, Calif., who also had an unlisted number.”

Mr. Reeves said that during the Cuban missile crisis, Mr. Kennedy even tracked down the House majority whip, the Democrat Hale Boggs of Louisiana, who was fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. A Navy helicopter dropped a bottle down to his boat with the following note: “Call Operator 18, Washington. Urgent message from the president.”

But now, in this day and age of instant and constant communication, the paradox may be that it is harder than ever to get in touch with people, Mr. Reeves said.

“In the old days, we didn’t know who was calling — it could be someone saying your mother is sick, it could be the president calling to say I want to put you on the Supreme Court, so you answered every phone call,” he said. “Now, because it’s everywhere, nothing seems important and you want to escape.”

Still, Mr. Reeves added, “If it was Obama, I’d answer it.”

Barclay Walsh contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on July 26, 2010, on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Losing a Game of Telephone Tag. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe